The summer the bats came, Duncan began wearing only blue and my breasts grew a whole cup size as if I were feeding them better. The day I first noticed the bats, I had gone outside to watch the Roto-Rooter men dig up the Dorsetts’ backyard. Mr. Dorsett paced back and forth as the muddy men lifted parts of the lame septic tank out of the hole. I admit I was sort of glad about it. I could tell the whole thing embarrassed Mr. Dorsett because he was stinking up the entire neighborhood. It was the end of May and even though it wasn’t too hot yet, neighbors were shutting their doors and windows and turning on the AC.
Mr. Dorsett looked over at our yard periodically to see if my dad had come out to watch the cavern that Mr. D’s backyard was becoming, and I’d wave and smile like we were old pals. Across Mr. Dorsett’s yard, I saw Mrs. McCorkle. She was kneeling in her garden, tugging at something. When she looked up, Mr. Dorsett waved nervously at her, and she smiled and yelled, “Hello, Ivy.” I smiled back.
No love is lost between Mr. Dorsett and me. When I was eight years old, he wouldn’t allow his twelve-year-old daughter, Judy, to play with me anymore. He claimed he was afraid she would pick up infantile habits or her brain wouldn’t be properly stimulated if she didn’t hang out with kids her own age. Personally, I think he didn’t like me because of my unorthodox religious views. I think he was just steamed because I told Judy that when I prayed, I said it to my stomach, because that’s where I thought God was—on the inside somewhere, maybe swimming in my small intestine or spinning around in my pancreas.
Judy told me the next day she was poking herself in the stomach, on the lookout for signs of a higher power hiding inside her, when her father asked her what in Henry’s name she was doing. Judy, a hopelessly brick-headed literalist, told Mr. Dorsett what I’d said and asked him if God in the pancreas portended problems for the body later on (having just covered insulin and bile production in science class). She saw divine diabetes in my future and probably pictured my organs sagging with the weight of being occupied so intimately. I think she was hoping to find the tumor of God inside her stomach so she could push him up into her arm or cheek or some other harmless spot where he’d be less likely to interfere with her bodily processes.
Mr. Dorsett was a deacon at a church where going to movies, even The Million Dollar Duck, was a sin, although it was A-OK to watch television. You weren’t supposed to dance either. It was probably a sin if you were even caught swaying a little. And music was definitely out unless the lyrics mentioned rising from the grave or the blood of the lamb or something. I went to this church. Once. I sat between Judy and Mr. Dorsett. The minister didn’t talk, he yelled, like we all had a hearing loss of some sort (after several Sundays of that, I think we would have—probably an evangelical strategy for quick, resistance-free supplication: deaf lambs don’t bleat back, a way to shut the mutton up). He leaned out over the pulpit and practically screamed the Word. His face was puffy, and the thick folds of his cheeks filled with red. I don’t think he got enough oxygen. He exhaled quite a bit, but I didn’t see him inhale much. He had gray cowlicked hair that kept flying forward in an arc over his eyes. It’s funny how some people think they have to look like they’re having a stroke to convince you of the incontrovertible god’s-honest truth of what they’re saying. I remember shaking and kicking my feet during the sermon, and Mr. Dorsett slapped my knees.
So I was secretly pleased about this septic tank thing because I thought it definitely pointed to Mr. Dorsett’s ailing karma . Actually, I am only a selective believer in karma. I believe in it when I think people are getting what they deserve, which, let’s face it, is pretty rare. But I still have a hard time accepting the idea that hungry babies with bubbled, empty stomachs are in that predicament because they were maybe serial killers or jewel thieves in a previous life. Babies are blank, nearly smooth-brained, with a wrinkle for complacency, a wrinkle for fear, and a crevasse for hunger and thirst. So it’s not like they’d learn a lesson or anything.
Anyhow, as I watched Mr. Dorsett pop Turns like they were Sweet Tarts, I saw them, I saw the bats. I didn’t know what they were at first. I was picking a scabby fungus off our sycamore tree, half expecting it to bleed, and thinking it was odd the tree already had a few dead leaves. Then, a little higher up, I noticed these yellowish-brown bulbs, and it appeared our sycamore tree had suddenly grown peaches, like it was tired of simply being a sycamore and thought it might get more respect as a fruit-bearer.
I reached up to examine one of these dead leaves, and as I touched it, an electric feeling zipped up my arm and across my cheek. This leaf was soft and angry. It started shaking and screeching. I instinctively fell to the ground, in case it got the idea to dive bomb my head or something. It unfolded wings that were like little flannel rags, then it and a few friends dropped from the tree and flew off. As they screamed by, I actually glimpsed their faces, these furry little crumpled-up cartoon faces. They looked like one of those pictures you’d see in the backs of magazines or on the insides of matchbooks, and if you drew it and sent it in, somebody, somewhere, for a small fee, would tell you whether you should go to art school.
I examined the tree more closely and counted about fifteen bats total. Some were hanging freely on the branches convincingly miming dead leaves and others were curled up tight like tiny fists beneath real leaves. They ranged in color from yellowish to orangish brown, but none was black like bats are supposed to be. After I fully realized what I was looking at, I got a little spooked, thinking maybe they got their coloring from blood feasts. Then I noticed how beautiful they were. They looked like yellow flowers gone to seed. I reached up to touch one tucked beneath a leaf.
“You all right?”
My heart dropped into my Chuck Taylors. Mr. Dorsett. He scared the befreakinjesus out of me. You know how you’re getting ready to touch something, maybe a smashed snake or an unidentifiable dark object lying in a corner, and some wiseacre comes out of nowhere and says something, or maybe your own stomach growls, and for a nanosecond you think the thing spoke to you, you think you just had a genuine brush with the godhead? Jeezoman, that’s what I felt, until I heard the gate close.
“Hi, Mr. Dorsett.” I brushed myself off and bent forward so my hair fell over my quadruply pierced ears, potential lecture fodder. “Too bad about your yard,” I said. “Quite the terra carnage.” I felt a thin smile spread across my face despite my best efforts to straighten my lips.
“What were you doing?”
“I wasn’t dancing.” I thought of that old joke about Baptists, who won’t have sex standing up for fear it will be mistaken for dancing. Even though it had been eight years and Judy was now the sort of young Republican Type A personality urban professional overachiever I would never hang with anyway, I was still a little peeved at Mr. Dorsett. I didn’t feel like being overly civil.
“What were you looking at?” Mr. Dorsett moved in closer and looked up at the tree.
“I was just looking to see, um … if that new tree food was working.”
“New tree food?” Mr. Dorsett looked intently at my face, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes, as if my nose had just fallen off and a big tulip had bloomed in its place.
“A couple of months ago, we got this revolutionary new botanical grow food they were selling on television. You know, it comes with Ginsu knives, or Popeil’s Pocket Fisherman, I forget, if you order early. You sprinkle it around your tree and within a couple of months, you get fruit, apples or peaches, or sometimes even mangoes. Look.” I pointed at the furry orange balls dangling from a high branch. Mr. Dorsett gave me this dour no-nonsense look like he’d had just about enough and if I didn’t come clean soon, he was going to march me over to my parents and demand I be locked in the laundry room or shipped off to a reformatory for inveterate smart alecks or something, in the interest of the community.
“Bats,” I relented. The way he dropped his jaw and began to back up, you’d think I’d said jackals or two-headed goats. “They’re really neat.”
Mr. Dorsett grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back from the tree. “Bats are dangerous,” he said. “Disease-ridden.”
“No, they’re not.” I didn’t like how Mr. Dorsett was all nosy and pushing me around in my own yard. “They’re little, harmless bats. They get bad press, but they’re not actually going to morph into Barnabas Collins or Bela Lugosi for Christsakes.” My heart raced as I said this last part—it came out of my mouth before I could put on the brakes—because I knew it was going to make the blood zoom in alarm to Mr. Dorsett’s face.
“You listen here, missy …” Just then there was a minor explosion next door and black, foul-smelling goop started erupting from the hole in Mr. Dorsett’s backyard.
“Looks like you got a gusher. Maybe you’ve struck black gold,” I said as Mr. Dorsett raced out the gate.
* * *
I decided to go over to Duncan’s to tell him about the bats. I knew he’d think it was totally gravy that we had bats hanging out in our sycamore tree. Duncan is my best friend. He moved to What Cheer from Medicine Lodge when we were both ten years old. The day after he moved in, he came over with two turtles, and he let me paint a red I for Ivy on the back of one. We tried to race them, but they kept going in opposite directions. Duncan said that was their secret strategy, that they whispered to one another, “Odds are better if we split up.” Duncan and I have been inseparable ever since. Now, nearly every day, Duncan’s father will ask, “You two attached at the hip?” And Duncan’s mother will wrinkle her nose and say, “No, dear. They’re attached at the heart,” and then she’ll wink. It’s a little nauseating. Duncan’s mom is super nice, but she can get on your nerves. She’s the type that asks you every ten seconds if you’re warm enough, cool enough, hungry, thirsty, etcetera, always on the lookout for ways to serve and placate. I think she took the gleefully self-denying good-girl lessons of the Donna Reed Show a little too much to heart when she was growing up. Once Duncan and I made signs that said, YES, WE’RE WARM ENOUGH, OUR BODY TEMPERATURES ARE HOLDING STEADY AT EXACTLY 98.6 and NO, WE’RE NOT HUNGRY, WE’RE FULL AS TICKS AND COULDN’T POSSIBLY EAT ANOTHER MORSEL. Mrs. Nicholson smiled and said, “Oh, you two,” but she still asks.
Mr. Nicholson is a world-class cornball without equal. He’s the kind of guy who steals little kids’ noses, tells them that eating beets will put hair on their chests, as if that were a perk, and assigns them dippy nicknames that make them feel as though they’re wearing their underwear outside their pants. Of course Ivy is an easy target. “That girl’s poison, Duncan,” he’ll say. “You better hope you never get the itch for her.” Yuk, yuk. When I was younger, he used to call me Intravenous de Milo, a nickname filched from Spinal Tap, which he’d been forced to watch countless times with Duncan, and he’d say, “I need a love transfusion, I.V” Then he’d make me kiss a vein. Once I said to him, “Boy, we’ll never starve around here so long as you keep dishing that corn,” and he quit razzing me, cold turkey, for days. I didn’t say it with even a drop of malice, but I guess it took the fun out of it to have his behavior suddenly named like that, so now I just swallow it wholesale and roll my eyes like he likes. Mr. Nicholson calls their five-year-old neighbor Jill Shipley, Henrietta, for no good reason except that it makes her madder than hell.
If the caption WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? were beneath a Nicholson family photo, you’d pick Duncan out in a second. Duncan has nappy, brown hair that curls off the top of his head like it’s trying to escape. It’s cut real short on the sides and there’s a yin/yang symbol shaved against his scalp in the back. His favorite thing to wear is a Zippy the Pinhead T-shirt that says, ALL LIFE’S A BLUR OF REPUBLICANS AND MEAT.
Some of the beef-necked deltoids at school pick on Duncan. They wear buttons that announce they are the FAG-BUSTER PATROL. The insignia on the buttons is a limp wrist with a circle and slash. They call Duncan fag-bait and say, “Bend over, Joy Boy, I’ll drive.” And I say, “You realize the implications here are much more damning for you.” I whisper confidentially, “You’re obviously suffering from Small Penis Syndrome.” Then I put my finger on one of their big, clunky belt buckles, run it down the fly, and say, “You really ought to have that looked at.” Of course, they shoot back, agile and witty as the redwoods they resemble, with, “Stupid lesbo” or “Shut up, cunt.” These guys listen to Guns and Roses instructionally and dream of the day they’ll bury their girlfriends in the backyard. Real princes.
Duncan, on the other, less simian, hand, is beautiful, completely beautiful inside and out. His skin is white as Elmer’s glue, and if you look into his gray-green eyes too long, you’ll slam your foot down because you’ll feel like you’re falling. It’s like having a semi-lucid dream where you’ve just voluntarily stepped off a cliff, and one of the things you’re thinking about on the way down is how they say you can have a heart attack if you let yourself splat because you’re so into it. But me, I always bounce. I’m into it too, it’s just that I believe in options. With Duncan, I know anything is possible.
So about Duncan. After I watched Mr. Dorsett race around the heaving hellmouth in his backyard for a while, I went to see Duncan. Mrs. Nicholson answered the door, and she busted out crying when she saw me. “I’m sorry, Ivy,” she said. “Come in.” She hugged me hard and for a long time, like she’d just recovered me from a kidnapper, ten years and forty thousand milk cartons later. She pushed my hair behind my ears and cupped my face in her hands. “You kids are so young,” she said, and I could tell her voice was only a few syllables away from giving out. “Duncan’s in his room.”
As I walked up the stairs, my mind raced, trying to compute the meaning of such a greeting. I became paranoid, which is my stock response to inexplicable distress in adults, followed closely by either blind self-blame or -defense, depending. I was worried that maybe Mr. Dorsett had told them he feared I’d joined a strange new cult, a druidic splinter group, that worshipped at the altar of tree-roosting bats. Mr. Dorsett tended to see rank-smelling theological peril everywhere he stepped.
But as I entered Duncan’s room, I instantly forgot what it was I had just been stressing about, like some corrective, cosmic hand had reached into my head with one of those pink erasers and rubbed out those brain cells. Duncan was sitting on his bed reading Death on the Installment Plan, listening to Fad Gadget, a recent bargain-bin coup. I choke on the gag, but I don’t get the joke. Somehow Duncan’s skin seemed even paler, as if the glue had been watered down; his lips looked almost blue. “Hey, Dune, what’s up? Your mom’s tripping.”
Duncan stood up. “Look,” he said, and started unbuttoning his jeans.
“Wow, is there some sort of planetary misalignment that’s making people wig or what?” I made a feeble attempt to avert my eyes. I was in fact very curious about what kind of underwear Duncan wore—one of the few subjects we’d never covered. Striped boxers. Cool. He hiked his shorts up a little and pointed at his thigh, the scars from his moped accident. “I’ve seen your scars before. I like them. Except for this fading one on my cheek, I don’t have any good scars.” He turned around. The scars wound around his thigh and ran down his legs in widening, white lines past his knees. There were three lines that stopped at different places, as if they were racing. The lines were eerie, almost fluorescent against his milky legs. They looked like symbols or rebus, like they were trying to tell us something, like maybe they’d spell out a message when they reached the appropriate point. Duncan put his jeans back on. “Jesus, Duncan. Your scars are growing. What’s the skinny?”
“So much for swimsuit season,” he said. He tried to smile. I hugged him. I hugged him like Mrs. N. had hugged me. Even though Duncan had put his jeans back on, I kept seeing those lines, as if a flashbulb had gone off and branded the image on my retinas. I saw the lines lift off his legs and circle around my head, curling in through one ear and out the other. I saw them slip under the surface of the skin in my face, making fleshy speed bumps across the pavement of my cheeks. I thought about the movie Squirm and the electrified worms that terrorized people, getting under their skin, literally. I wanted to make the droopy, gray crescents under Duncan’s eyes go away.
“Hey, Dune, remember that scene in Squirm when that woman turned on the shower and the worms started oozing out the holes in the shower head, and then she turned the faucets back off and the worms retreated?” I laughed.
“They think it’s some bizarro thing called morphea, or sclero-derma, they’re not sure. They looked at pictures in dusty books they hadn’t cracked since medical school and scratched their chins, told me they were just nose and throat guys, not weird disease experts. But they think it’s one of those one-in-a-million deals. Untreatable.” Duncan pulled me toward him and kissed me. It was a desperate kiss, as if he thought it might have some therapeutic or medicinal benefit. His tongue went everywhere, touched everything, took complete inventory. I believe if he’d had more tongue, he would have kept going straight down to my esophagus, blazing a trail inside me.
I pushed him back. I wondered if this was one of his games. Sometimes Duncan is so childlike, almost obsessive-compulsive, a magical thinker. He makes up these games or rituals and convinces himself that his wish will come true if he completes his task. Like if he can successfully throw and catch his boomerang twenty times in a row while juggling cantaloupes, it’s a sign he’ll get accepted to UC Berkeley or receive manna, or something like that. The spooky thing is that it almost always works. I guess the psychologists would say it’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it’s still kind of unsettling. I mean Duncan’s no Nostradamus or Uri Geller or Tiresias or anything, he just knows what he wants.
“Morphea?” I said. “That sounds like science fiction. You’re making this up?” I said hopefully. We sat down on his bed. I was starting to get seriously creeped out.
“No. I’m not.”
“Is it some kind of sleeping sickness?”
“No. Misnomer.”
“Spill it, Dunc-man. You’re making me nervous.”
Duncan fingered the shaved path of the yin/yang symbol shorn into his scalp. “I don’t know if you remember the niggling details of my injury or not—who knew it was going to matter—but these scars I got aren’t from being cut or anything like that, they’re from the impact. You know, from being pressed up against the curb. They’re called compression scars.” Duncan stopped and looked at me like what he had just said was dangerously illuminating, the key to sudden understanding, and he was waiting for me to say a slow and knowing “Ohhh” and nod my head.
“Yeah, keep going.”
“I guess we should have held out for more insurance money. Evidently these compression scars can come back to haunt you, big time. They can lie dormant like some goddamned ghost wound hibernating in your leg. And you don’t know, you think you’re fine. You just think you got some awesome scars to show the grandkids later on. Then these scars, they, like, come to life and spread across your whole body, and after they’re done striping the outside, they can tear through your insides too, clipping the sharp edges off your internal organs like goddamned scissors. Fuck.” Duncan bent over his wastepaper basket. “Maybe you ought to go, Ive. I think I’m going to be sick. I don’t have a stomach for tragedy,” he said.
“Wait. I don’t believe this,” I said. “I’ve never heard of anything like this before. This sounds like some made-up disease from another planet, something you’d get inoculated for before traveling to, I don’t know, Neptune or something. Surely there’ve been like a bazillion people who’ve had these compression scars, right? I mean how come I’ve never heard of this?”
“I don’t know, Ive, I guess it’s not very high up on the research priority list.” Duncan wrapped his arms around himself. “They just don’t know shit about it. Fucking doctors. They’re not even willing to commit themselves to this diagnosis. You could hear their malpractice-fearing knees knocking together every time they uttered the word morphea.” Duncan began rocking slowly back and forth on the bed.
I twisted the spirals of hair that hung over his forehead. “Why didn’t you tell me about this, about these scars?”
“Because. I didn’t really know anything until today.”
I felt my stomach start to knot in a way only a Boy Scout could appreciate, hundreds of tiny hands pressing against the walls. “So is it for sure …”
“Time to feed the worms? Should I prepare for the big dirt nap?”
I nodded.
“They don’t know. You could fill a thimble with what those bastards know about it. They said it might stop spreading and maybe it will never go inside. They said it could take a few months, a few years, few decades, maybe never happen, maybe happen tomorrow. Real conclusive stuff.” Duncan looked straight into my eyes and softened his voice to a whisper. “I’m afraid to move,” he said. “It’s like I have this big rip in my pants or something, and if I move, I could die.” He kept looking and looking at me, and I felt like he could see my thoughts, could see me thinking, If you die, Duncan Nicholson, I’ll, I’ll cut off my hands and feet and sit in one place until I can come too. His bottomless eyes. I steadied myself against the bed.
Duncan reached out and pressed his hand against my left breast, the larger one. “I don’t want to die a virgin,” he said.
I always thought this would be a great moment, that I’d feel velvety needles prickle against my skin. But it wasn’t like that at all. It wasn’t like anything. I couldn’t feel it. If I hadn’t seen his hand on my breast, I would never have known it was there. My breast felt novocained, heavy, but it definitely did not tingle, not a single goosebump, and I bump easy. I wanted to say, “Yes, Duncan. I love you, Duncan. Take me, take me,” or whatever it is you say between hot gasps in moments such as these, moments that until this one I had only experienced vicariously through the lives of Chelsea Starling, secretly passionate nurse, and Vanessa Vandehorn, bored but sexy rich girl. But I couldn’t. Had I wanted to, I couldn’t even say something stupid like, “Could I please have a pretzel first?” My brain and mouth were momentarily disconnected. All I could do was stand up with my numb breast and dysfunctional lips and walk out.
Things can get so strange so fast.
* * *
The sun was going down and the cicadas were throbbing. I wondered if the sound bothered the bats, if it disturbed their sleep. I sat very still on the picnic table. I decided to keep an eye on these fraudulent leaves. My brain was still buzzing from the strange bomb Duncan had dropped. Morphea. It sounded like a name for a host of late night horror flicks—Morphea Bloodletter or something. I know I should have stayed with Duncan and tried to comfort him somehow, but I just had to bolt.
The bats were still snoozing. Mr. Dorsett still had a septic gorge in his backyard. I considered mentioning something about sky-tram rides across the smelly chasm next time I saw him, but decided against it. I guess I felt even Mr. Dorsett deserved a break. He was probably at church praying his head off, begging God to have mercy on his crummy plumbing.
I watched for signs of life from the wrinkled, brown leaves. You couldn’t even see them breathe. I thought about their metabolism, how it must slow during sleep so they can preserve energy for flying and foraging. I imagined their lungs as delicate bubbles, filling only once or twice a minute, their button-sized hearts beating slow and steady as a bathroom sink drip.
I thought about Duncan, about Duncan before all this. I thought about the night we rode our bikes toward a storm. The lightning in the distance was constant and bright. We counted the seconds between lightning and thunder and stopped riding when the flash and bang were almost on top of each other. We parked our bikes and walked along a dirt road that sliced a huge field of corn in two. The air smelled hot, burnt, and my mouth tasted like metal. We stared silently at the lightning, appreciatively, like we were at a laser show. You didn’t have to be looking in the right place to catch the silver zags either, because they were everywhere. And then I noticed the fireflies that hovered over the field, a blanket of yellow blinking above the corn in an uneven rhythm, a floating net of intermittent light, bright and fleeting stains against the black sky. I don’t know how long I’d been holding my breath, but all of a sudden I started gasping. Duncan pulled me toward him. He widened my mouth with his hands, turned his head, and put his mouth on mine. I was surprised at how well we fit together, no overlap, better than clasped hands. Then he breathed. He just breathed. I wondered where his tongue was and what it was doing, but it was only air that passed between us.
My stomach burbled with the memory, and a strange feeling like lit fuses sparked and trailed from my nipples down to my thighs. I wished Duncan were here touching me. I was sure I would feel it.
The dead leaves began wagging. The bats were dropping off one by one and flying in an erratic, noisy mass above the tree. The sycamore suddenly appeared a lot healthier. Up in the air like that, the bats looked like jittery little birds. The streetlights snapped on. The bats flew over and circled the lights, swooping into the buzzing glow periodically, feeding on mesmerized moths and June bugs.
Then I heard screaming, and my first thought was, Oh, no, they’ve gone and attached themselves to someone’s carotid artery; this was clearly the residue of Mr. Dorsett’s repulsion. But it was Mrs. McCorkle. “What?” she yelled, as she moved slowly across her backyard toward the pit of tamed sewage in Mr. Dorsett’s yard. She kneeled at the edge and looked in. “Harlan? Are you in there?” She wrestled a spidery vine out of the mud wall. “We’ll have to clean this up. Mercy. Come on now,” she said. She walked back to her house and disappeared through the back door.
Then I heard screaming again and things shattering. I walked around front and across Mr. Dorsett’s meticulously groomed front lawn toward Mrs. McCorkle’s. She was yelling at some invisible person, something about bluebells and pork roast, and smashing glass on her driveway. She lobbed an armful of plates and cups and jars onto the concrete and shook her fists in the air. She ran into her house and pulled her gauzy curtains off the rods. She ran back outside and started ripping them into thin strips. She spotted me at the end of her driveway and looked at me with narrowed eyes and tense lips, like she wanted to club me. My heart was pounding hard inside my chest, as though it wanted to get out before it was too late. I was 100 percent clueless as to a reasonable plan of action. I knew Mrs. McCorkle had these spells if she forgot to take some kind of medicine. I think she intentionally neglected to take it sometimes just because she was bored or lonely and needed her other self for company. Once last summer Mr. Dorsett was about to get into his car to leave for work when she ran over and started clobbering him over the head with a newspaper. She’d thought he was trying to steal her gladiolas. I admit I thought it was sort of amusing at the time, but now it felt like the whole world had completely kooked out, schizoid squared, like the planet had wobbled clean off its axis, and it was beginning to spook me but good. I wondered if some unstable isotope had been released into the atmosphere of What Cheer, or some volatile chemical that could take a once uneventful existence and turn it into something Lon Chaney would surely star in if her were alive (something Morphea Bloodletter would introduce on the Late-night Creature Feature). Or maybe the magnetic field reversal was finally here. Life, as I had known it, was out of whack.
“You,” Mrs. McCorkle said, still sneering at me. “You. Where’s Harlan? What have you done with him?”
“He’s at Medicalodge South, Mrs. McCorkle, the nursing home. Remember? He’s been there for a couple of months.” I stretched my arm out toward her for reasons I can’t begin to understand. I think the only reason she would have taken it would have been to rip it out of its socket and beat me about the head with it. Mrs. McCorkle snorted a few chuckles and ran inside. When she came back out, she had a large ceramic vase and a wall mirror. I backed up into the street. Mrs. McCorkle threw the vase and mirror onto the pile of shards. The crash was loud and sounded final; glinting splinters of mirror shot across the pavement like sharp bullets of light. She smiled and kicked off her shoes. She raised her dress above her knees, and I could feel my panicked stomach trying to push free of my body. “Don’t!”
She hopped onto the sharp rubble and pranced around like she was stomping grapes, smiling and stomping, dress in hand, as though she were just entertaining a tour group with this quaint, old-world custom. Then she went down on her hands and knees.
I think I may have screamed, but I couldn’t hear it. I walked unsteadily toward Mrs. McCorkle, my legs springy like pogo sticks. I made myself think, willed thoughts outside this scene to come into my head. I thought of the bats, wondered if they were watching and if they were glad to be bats with their breezy lives, hanging in trees, eating easy meals, ignorant of the unseen perils of power plants, compressed skin, and old age. I would have traded places with them at that moment. I wanted to rise, lift up and out of this life, and would have given it all up—Duncan; my bootleg albums, the Soft Boys, Captain Beefheart, the good old noisy collectible stuff strategically swapped for at used records stores; the archive of articles I’d been compiling since I was a kid on UFO sightings and the Viking Voyager expedition; my memory of Grandpa Engel and his magical teeth; my face, my breasts—the whole shmear. Would have given it up in the beat of a tiny wing.
Maintain, I told myself. I made my way slowly to Mrs. McCorkle. I grabbed her off the razory debris and wrestled her to the ground, which was no easy feat. Those age-worn arms and legs held surprising strength. Crimany. At first I was afraid if I handled her too rough, I might crack her bones or something, and then I was afraid she might crack mine.
I finally wore her down and began picking the spurs of glass from her hands and feet. She held her hands up and smiled like a child who’s made a mess of herself with spaghetti or ice cream. She looked pleased that we were both now covered in blood. Mr. Myers, next door on the other side, finally came out to investigate the commotion, and when he saw the blood and shattered glass, he started running around the yard screaming, “Oh, my god! Oh, god! Oh my god, Effie!” He picked Mrs. McCorkle up. She was playing itsy-bitsy spider on her shredded fingers. I could tell she was miffed when he made her lose her place. He carried her inside his house. My stomach finally made its way up into my throat, and I spit bile into the bloody grass.
I wished the bats would swoop down and pick me up by the collar and carry me off to some cold, quiet cave and feed me flies.
* * *
Duncan came over the next night and apologized like mad for being so pushy and forward and unromantic and all. He said the uncertainty of his body’s future gave all things nascent and physical a kind of guerrilla urgency. It made me feel crummy because I thought I should be the sorry one. I mean, I was the one who had abandoned him in his moment of need. It wasn’t like my sense of propriety had been wounded or anything. I think I just went concrete at that moment; maybe I was scared his skin might start falling off if we did it, like that grisly film of the aftermath in Hiroshima they made us watch in sixth grade. The captured shadows branded onto walls, the charred bodies, and all those people in the hospitals. And they just filmed it like it didn’t even matter that the people whose bombed bodies they were documenting were completely raw, almost jellied; they just let the cameras roll. I always wondered what those cameramen had eaten that day, pears or sweet rolls, rice cakes, carrots, whatever, and if they had been able to keep it down. What did they do when they were finished shooting that evening? Did they take a bath? Did they touch themselves? Did they stare at their skin in the mirror, waiting for it to move? Needless to say, this is not an association you want to make just before your premier sexual experience.
“I think you’re going to live through this, Duncan,” I told him. “In fact, I’m sure of it.”
“Yeah, what makes you so sure?”
“Well, last night I had this dream that we were old, ninety-five if we were a day, and we were sitting in a porch swing attached to this tree that I’m sure didn’t have nearly as many rings as we had wrinkles, and ‘Take the Skinheads Bowling’ was playing in the background. We were talking about the concert we went to last week like it was the good old days. And then we started comparing scars. We both had scars all over our pruney bodies. I had a cool fish-shaped one across my stomach. You were impressed.”
Duncan laughed. “At night I see my scars in my mind, and I watch them disappear as if someone had pulled up the plastic sheet on a Magic Slate.”
I noticed that Duncan was clad head-to-toe in blue. Usually he wore ten or twelve competing bright colors, and you could only look at him for so long before things started vibrating, visually speaking. But today he had on a navy blue bowling shirt that said “Earl” on the pocket, blue jeans, blue Converse high tops, and a blue bandanna around his ankle; a small blue marble dangled from his ear. “Say, what’s with this color-me-blue look?” I asked.
“It’s chromatherapy,” he said. “I saw it on Oprah or Sally Jessy, something. Different colors have certain effects on you emotionally and physically. Red is a stimulant. If you surrounded yourself with red, you’d constantly be doing chin-ups or something. Blue is supposed to be healing.” He shrugged his shoulders.
That’s one of my favorite-favorite things about Duncan, how he gives anything or anyone a chance. He accepts without complaint the absurdity that’s as prevalent as ether and knows anything is possible, even good weird things.
I told him about the bats and about Mrs. McCorkle. Duncan loved Mrs. McCorkle because she always said outrageous things even when she remembered to take her medication. Once she told us if she were president, she’d impose capital punishment only for excessive chatter in movie theaters. “That would rid society of an insidious element,” she said, “and help defray the population explosion.” I think she meant it too. Duncan wanted to send her blueberries and morning glories.
I showed Duncan the bats. They were resting again, the withered foliage shtick.
“Are you sure they’re bats?” Duncan asked. I pointed to the peaches near the top and showed him the ones clenched tight under leaves. “Wow,” he said. “They’re so beautiful. They look ancient and sacred. Like something in cave paintings.” Duncan’s voice began to crack. He gently placed both his hands on my breasts. “Do something for me,” he whispered.
My breasts were tingling, hot-wired, bubbling with current. “All right,” I said.
“What do these bats eat?”
“Insects mostly.”
“What time do they start feeding?”
“I don’t know. Around sundown.” I began to wonder what it was I was going to end up agreeing to do. I had a feeling it wasn’t what I had thought it was.
“Green and yellow are good colors, too,” he said. “Restorative. I’ll be back,” he said, walking away. He turned around. “Tomorrow night.”
* * *
When Duncan showed up, he was wearing only a busy madras pair of Bermuda shorts—no shirt, no shoes, nothing else. I hoped his scars wouldn’t glow in the dark. He was carrying a jar full of blinking fireflies and a coffee can full of dead bugs. “Will you humor me, Ive?” he asked.
“This isn’t going to involve like chicken blood, is it?”
Duncan smiled and shook his head. “What are your ’rents doing?” Duncan had this very serious look on his face; he looked sort of like Spencer Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, like he was getting ready to make an eloquent speech on a touchy issue.
“I don’t know. Watching a miniseries or something.”
“Will they come outside for any reason?” Duncan grabbed my arm like he wanted me to think before I answered.
“Not likely. Unless the couch catches fire.”
“Good. What about the Dorsetts?” He nodded his head toward their house.
“I haven’t seen them. I think maybe they left town.”
“Cool,” he said. “Where are the bats?”
I pointed to the streetlight; a dark halo circled around it. “A couple stick around the tree and dive at the porch light occasionally.”
Duncan took hold of my shoulders and led me under the canopy of the tree. He raised my arms and pulled my T-shirt over my head.
“Couldn’t we at least use a tent or something?” I asked. For most things you can count me in; my name and the word trooper come up a lot in the same sentence, but an exhibitionist I’m not. I don’t even like to undress in front of a mirror.
Duncan spread my shirt on the grass, pushed me down to my knees, then lowered me gently to the ground with my head in his hand, as if he were baptizing me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bat dive into the light. Duncan took the dead insects out of the coffee can and arranged them on my stomach: a June bug, a cricket, some flies and moths.
“Duncan, you know, this is weird.”
“I know,” he said.
“I refuse to eat them, if that’s what you had in mind.” My stomach itched, but I was afraid to scratch, like any movement might activate the insects and make them bore into my navel or something, as if Duncan had preprogrammed them. Stepford bugs.
“You don’t have to eat them,” he said.
I was relieved. Around Duncan I do things that under any other circumstances would lead me to believe I’m certifiably off my noodle.
Duncan sat down next to me. He took some fireflies out of the jar, held them between his fingers, waited for the blink, and crossed himself, smearing the phosphorescent abdomens onto his chest. He lay back. Duncan scissored his arms and legs like he was making snow angels, only I guess they were actually earth angels, invisible. “Close your eyes,” he said, “and do like I’m doing.” I flapped and kicked, and it felt sort of nice, like I was a low-flying, upside down bird.
I felt something brush against my stomach. My skin was sparking, crackling with heat. I felt my stomach and my heart lift out of my body, finally striking out on their own. My legs shook. I let myself feel it.