Mysterious Skin

  The meal shifted from soup to main course. I’d swallowed five or six mouthfuls before I noticed my mother’s guns on the kitchen counter: three of them, as well as a leather holster and belt, a scattering of bullets, and handcuffs that shone in the kitchen light. One month earlier, my mother had called San Francisco to describe a disastrous escape attempt from KSIR. Although she hadn’t been there for the mayhem, she was nevertheless disturbed by what had transpired. The inmates had held two co-workers hostage; prior to capture, their kingpin had buried a hammer’s claw end into one hostage’s skull. My mother had told me how she planned to buy extra weapons. I remembered trying to explain how bizarre that sounded—guns in Little River, a town of less than a thousand people, a town where the most criminal act to occur in the last two decades had been the theft of ten gallons of gas at the local Texaco, “That’s just all your San Francisco peace and love speaking,” she’d said. “If you could see what I’ve seen….”

  My mother saw me staring at the guns. “Do those have to be out in the open?” I asked.

  To appease me, she stashed the weapons in a cupboard and returned to the table. Her voice took on a mock seriousness. “The way I see it is this. Now, if anyone tries to hurt you or Brian, they’ll have to deal with me.”

  When she said that, Brian whispered a question to Eric. “Then where was she ten years ago?” My mother didn’t hear, and I assumed I wasn’t supposed to either. His words elicited a discomfited shrug from Eric. I didn’t ask what he meant.

  I woke during the night and thought of how, as a little girl, I would sometimes sneak across the hall to Brian’s room. I’d kneel beside his bed, still woozy within my own somnolence, and imagine myself a world-renowned sleep researcher or a girl with superhuman powers who could enter the mind of anyone she wanted. I’d whisper words into the shell of his ear, words I honestly believed would reshape Brian’s dream scenarios to make him happy.

  Three-thirty, according to the bedside clock. Pinkish white clouds bloomed in the night sky outside my window, the kind that glow through the darkness. I hoped they signaled snow. Lines from “White Christmas” lilted through my head as I stood from bed. I tiptoed. Now, as an adult, spying on Brian felt criminal, but I opened his door anyway.

  Brian had left his blankets strewn this way and that, one’s fleecy corner spilling over the mattress to touch the floor. He wasn’t there, and I prepared to trudge back to my own warm bed. Then I noticed how Brian’s room had changed. His books were missing, as well as the posters he’d tacked up long ago, the advertisements for sci-fi films, the colorful monsters and aliens and astronauts that had held reign over his room for so many years. Gone, too, were the mobiles he’d hung in the corners, those ships and planes I remembered twirling from his ceiling on even the previous Christmas, the last time I’d come home.

  Now, only one thing remained on Brian’s wall, a small memento he’d taped to the space next to his bed. I stepped closer. It looked like a photograph. I could see a group of petite boys, standing and kneeling in two rows, staring out from the picture. They wore uniforms; some held baseballs and bats. I scanned their faces, their eerie smiles and eyes, before recognizing one of the boys as Brian. That had been so long ago.

  I looked around me, at Brian’s barren, strangely meticulous room. It had never been so clean, and something about it made me feel lonesome. I began to shiver, so I tiptoed back to my own room.

  My friend Breeze telephoned the next morning. She and her husband planned to spend December twenty-third visiting friends in Garden City, and she needed a baby-sitter to watch her two children. I had nothing better to do. “Wonderful,” I said. Then, as I hung up: “How typical.”

  The living room television was playing, sound off. A cartoon cast its vibrant greens and oranges over Brian’s and Eric’s faces. They lay sleeping on the floor, arms and legs splayed, as if frozen in a complicated dance. A pair of pillows from my mother’s bed sat next to their heads, and Eric cuddled one against his ear. I assumed she had placed them there before she’d departed for work. She could keep three, four, even a thousand guns in the house, and it still wouldn’t fool me: she’d always be her same worried, tame, overprotective self.

  When I’d met Eric, his exaggerated seriousness and shadowy, downcast eyes terrified me. It would have been easy to imagine him sprawled on the floor in some icy bathroom, his slit wrists gushing blood across the tiles. But now, there on the floor with Brian, he looked harmless, even angelic. He smiled in his sleep. I didn’t want to wake him, but Breeze would be arriving soon with the kids, so I had to.

  “Ahem.” No response. I opened a window, letting the frigid air curl into the room, and slammed it shut. At the sound, Eric’s eyes fluttered open. “Shit” was his first word. His hair looked like overgrown thistledown, garlanded with a ball of carpet fuzz. He looked toward the television, where a cartoon cat’s eyes crossed as a mouse bashed its head with a sledgehammer. The cartoon blended into a commercial; Eric turned, seeing me. “Oh, hi.”

  “Good morning,” I said. “Hate to wake you two, but an old friend’s coming over to drop off her kids. How does helping me baby-sit sound?”

  Eric yawned and placed a hand on Brian’s shoulder: it was a motherly gesture, strange and feminine. He nudged Brian, rousing him. “Kids,” Eric said. “How old are they?”

  “Michael is about four, I guess. The little one’s still in diapers.” He gave me a horrified look. Brian, on the other hand, seemed confused, glancing from Eric to the television to me. “Breeze is on her way over,” I told him. “We get to baby-sit the kids for the day.”

  While Brian dawdled in the shower, Eric assisted me in picking up around the house. He seemed to know better than I where things were located; he returned from the kitchen holding a can of furniture polish and a rag I recognized as torn from one of my father’s old shirts. A lemony spray sizzled forth; Eric glossed the rag over the coffee table, the TV, the rocking chair’s knucklebones. We didn’t speak, but kept catching each other’s eye: I watched him, he watched me.

  Breeze arrived, clutching the baby in one arm, a wrapped package in the other. A suitcase sat at her feet. When I met her at the front door, I noticed her husband waving to me from their car. “We’d stay a bit, but we’re in a hurry,” Breeze said. Her breath clouded the air. The older boy, Michael, whirlwinded past me to perch beside the television. Breeze stared at him. “TV should keep him occupied.” I took the baby from her arms, and she positioned the suitcase and package inside the door. “Diapers, food, all the necessities. The gift is just some fruit,” she, said. “Better eat it quick or it will spoil.” She dug into her pocket and handed me a matchbook with a telephone number written on it. “We’ll be at this number. We’ll return before dark. I hope everything goes okay. Good-bye, Michael.” She kissed the baby’s head. “Good-bye, David.”

  Brian walked in, scrubbing a towel across wet hair. Eric pointed across the room toward Michael, who hadn’t taken his eyes from the cartoon. The cat gulped a birthday cake which, unbeknownst to the animal, was crammed with dynamite; its stomach exploded, and the cat became a blackened shadow with shocked white eyes. Michael rocked to and fro, still wearing his coat, giggling along with the cartoon mouse.

  Brian saw my armful of David, and he placed his fingers against the baby’s face. “Wow.” I pushed David forward a little, and one tiny hand reached out, as if beckoning Brian to hold him. “He won’t cry, will he?” I shrugged and delivered him into Brian’s arms.

  “He feels like a gigantic sponge,” Brian said into David’s face. His voice altered, becoming thinner, inching up half an octave. “And somebody’s squeezed the water from the sponge, but there’s still a little bit left in there, just enough to keep the sponge damp.” He thumbed David’s nose. Eric looked at me, one eyebrow raised.

  In the following hour, Brian and Eric helped me feed the baby, took turns trying to burp him, and clumsily assisted when I changed his diaper. They waited for him to fall asleep, gently smoothing crea
ses on his shirt. David nodded off at last, and while he snoozed on the living room floor, Brian and Eric headed for the kitchen. They made lunch: peanut butter sandwiches, formed into shapes from Christmas cookie cutters. Mine was a star; Brian and Eric got bells; and Michael, a fat Santa Claus, toy-filled sack slung on his back. Michael licked a dot of peanut butter from his upper lip. “Mommy always lets me have dessert,” he said.

  Eric remembered the fruit and fetched Breeze’s gift from its spot at the doorway. I let Michael rip through the paper. Inside a basket, behind see-through green cellophane, were pears, oranges, apples, bananas. “Some Xmas present,” Eric said.

  Michael stared awhile, deciding. He was a ferocious-looking child, with a pug nose and hair the color of copper. His forehead sprouted a cowlick, the skin beneath it revealing a vein’s blue squiggle. He selected a pear and put it to his lips. His mouth punched a miniature hole into its yellow skin. “Yuck.” He handed the pear to Eric, who stood and began juggling the pear, an orange, and an apple. He tossed them into various configurations, hands snagging them from the air like a magician’s. Michael watched, fascinated.

  Brian selected three paring knives from the kitchen. He lined a red Delicious, a yellow, and a green Granny Smith side by side, forming a stoplight pattern on the floor. He told Eric and me to take our pick. “We’ll show you how to make apple-head dolls,” he said to Michael. Brian and I had done this once when we were little. We’d skinned apples and carved faces, then arranged them in a window to harden and degenerate. Over a period of weeks, the apples took shape, wrinkling into amber-colored “heads” that looked like shrewd, prehistoric people. We’d jammed pencils into the heads and dressed them in doll clothes.

  Michael gawked as we began peeling and carving. I whittled slits for eyes, nostrils, a frown; my apple took on the countenance of an evil crone. Eric changed the round shape of his face completely, giving it sunken cheeks, a square jawline, even meticulously shaping rows of square teeth.

  Brian couldn’t decide what to carve. Eric and I displayed our dolls as we completed each feature, but after Brian finished peeling, he passed his smooth apple from palm to palm, indecisive. “Mine’s a skull,” Eric told him, “so how about your trademark alien?”

  Brian looked disgusted for a second. “I knew you’d say that.” He adjusted his glasses, thumbprinting one lens with apple juice. “I told you to shut up about it. It’s history.” Eric fidgeted, and I concentrated harder on my knife’s placement in my doll. Brian stabbed the knifepoint into the apple and curved it, hollowing out an almond-shaped eye. Another. The rest of his face was easy: two pinpricks for nostrils, a feeble cut for a mouth. He rubbed his thumbs into the apple-head’s eyes, as if polishing them. “There,” he told Eric. “Satisfied?”

  When finished, we displayed the apples for Michael. “Normally,” Brian instructed, “you’d wait for these heads to dry. But we don’t have to do that.” He grinned at Eric, apparently no longer angry. He searched the house for pencils and returned with three, fashioning bodies for the apple dolls.

  The telephone rang, and I ran to the kitchen. It was my mother, calling from work to check up. I told her about baby-sitting, how Brian and Eric had helped me through the day. “Is everything okay with Brian?” she asked. When I said I guessed so, she seemed relieved. “He’s been acting funny lately. More and more as Christmas approaches, though I can’t tell why. Maybe I’m imagining things. But he was awake before I left this morning, and that was unnatural. Just staring out the window, all nervous.”

  “I don’t know.” I peeked into the front room, where Eric and Brian, now ventriloquists, performed a demented apple puppet show for Michael. Eric gripped the pencil bodies of the skull and alien apples and skipped them toward Michael. The little boy screamed. Brian quickly grabbed the alien doll from Eric’s hand and pushed it aside.

  My mother was still talking, and I tried to assimilate her words with those between Eric and Brian. Their conversation, while hushed, seemed more interesting. Eric asked “What’s wrong?” but I didn’t catch my brother’s answer. Eric mentioned something about “one more day, then you’ll calm down.”

  I heard an intercom page my mother’s name on the other end. “Sergeant Lackey, line one.” She paused. “You kids know I love you,” she said. Another pause. “You will tell Brian I love him, won’t you?”

  “Yes.” In the next room, Michael giggled. “Stop worrying,” I heard Eric say. I looked in; he was speaking to Brian, not Michael. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  I didn’t think about what my mother had said until that evening, when Breeze returned for her children. Michael rushed for the door, and Brian lifted David from the floor as if his skin were glass. He surrendered the baby into Breeze’s arms. It immediately began crying; for an alarming second its cranky and swollen face resembled one of the carved apples. Breeze thanked us, and Brian swallowed a breath and gripped her shoulder. “Please take good care of them,” he told her. “Keep both eyes on them, no matter what.” I wondered what that meant. I looked to see if Eric mirrored my slight embarrassment, but he was watching the floor.

  My mother’s words echoed in my head again later, after Eric had driven back to Hutchinson. I stood at the sink finishing dishes. From the window I saw Brian, bundled in his coat, tramping through the blustery wind on the hillside. He crouched down, burrowing in the dirt with his fingers. He placed something in the little grave he’d dug. Then he stood again and began stomping his feet on the mound of dirt, as if throwing a tantrum he’d been waiting to throw for years. I instantly thought of the night our father had left, and the mindless dance Brian had reeled through, there in that very spot.

  I wadded the dish towel; retrieved my coat from the living room. That afternoon, Eric had placed the crone, the skull, and the alien on the windowsill to dry; now, however, the alien was missing. I didn’t need to hurry outside. At that moment I knew what Brian had buried in the dirt, knew what he’d stomped into the earth. But I didn’t know why.

  In my half-sleep, I heard my bedroom door click open. Brian padded in. Darkness almost camouflaged him, thanks to the black shirt and sweatpants he’d probably mimicked from Eric’s wardrobe. He lurked in the shadows at the threshold of my room, his breathing’s constancy like the steady ticking of a clock. Could he tell my eyes were open? At last he stepped forward, the side of his face and neck exposed by the moonlight’s cold shelf. His skin looked clearer than ever, and I could see one eye, deep blue and dreamy, like a marble held to light.

  “Deb,” he whispered. He made the nervous blinking gesture.

  I snaked a leg from under the blanket, and he stepped back. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m awake.”

  Brian sat on the bed’s creaky edge. Moonlight cast its diagonal across him, striping a banner on his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s late.” I toed his elbow, a gesture to signal it didn’t matter.

  He wanted to talk. He needed someone to listen; without speaking, I nodded, urging him on. “Tomorrow”—he looked at the bedside clock—“well, actually today, I’ll meet this guy named Neil. It’s really important. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  I didn’t. “What’s happening? What’s going on with you?”

  “I don’t know where to start. It’s about all the things that used to happen to me. I used to pee the bed, I was always blacking out. You remember. All of that, everything, was stemming from something else. Whatever it was, it fucked me up. And I think I know what it was. I know, but I don’t know. It’s all fucked up.” Brian’s sentences didn’t quite connect; they were like fragments gouged from various conversations. And I’d rarely heard my brother swear. But rather than making him seem tougher or more seasoned, these words did the opposite. They lent him a curious innocence.

  “Go on,” I said. I was whispering; at that second it seemed the only way to speak. “Be more specific.”

  “This guy named Neil. Whatever happened to me, happened to him too. But he rememb
ers better than I do. I’m sure he knows what happened the night you found me in the space beneath the house. He might even know what happened that Halloween, in the woods, when I blacked out.” Brian made a hiccuping sound, then quickly spat out the next sentences. “It wasn’t a UFO. It was our coach. And Neil knows. He’s going to be here soon. He’s going to tell me. To confirm things. I’ve been waiting for him for years.”

  His words confused me. I opened my mouth to form questions; Brian must have anticipated this because he stopped me. “No,” he said. At that moment he inched forward, leaning his head beside me, brushing closer until his ear touched my left shoulder. I moved my right arm and cradled his face in my hand, gently closing his eyelids with my fingers. His breathing grazed my skin, as delicate and even as a glassblower’s.

  The questions remained, but I couldn’t ask them. I couldn’t speak at all. I simply held my little brother as night dammed the room around us, until, at last, we fell asleep.

  sixteen

  ERIC PRESTON

  A merman starred in my afternoon nap’s dream. He lifted himself from the water, twisting his half-human, half-barracuda body onto a sea-splashed rock. His tail’s scales glittered green, then gold, then green again. He brushed away starfish and anemones, sighed, and craned his neck to face the sky. His flawless mouth opened and he sang, mournfully lamenting the ordinary love of a mortal…

  …his voice blended into my grandma’s. “Eric, sweetie, you’ve got a guest.” So much for dreaming. I hauled myself back to reality and remembered it was the night of Neil’s scheduled return. But Neil wasn’t the guest Grandma spoke about. “I believe it’s your friend Brian,” she said. Right—Mrs. McCormick had invited us for dessert, a Christmas Eve welcome-home party for Neil.

  Brian appeared in the doorway. His looks had altered, his hair now brushed and parted, his skin scrubbed and shining, touches of pink zit cream daubed here and there. He grinned, but the expression seemed false. Was that expression due to Neil?