Cat waited until Corky’s mother left before she turned off his respirator and attached a T-piece to the end of his endotracheal tube.
The boy was asleep and dreaming, his eyeballs sliding around under his lids. Seventeen years old and he wanted to die? He must have been collecting the assortment of pills for weeks considering that half the boxes on the comprehensive drug screen lab slip were checked off.
None of the pieces fit the usual adolescent OD profile. In his chart the kid’s personal history read like that of a model character out of Ozzie and Harriet: a clean-cut product of a functional, somewhat yuppified existence.
The boy’s mother was levelheaded though appropriately confused as to why her son had tried to kill himself. She’d told Cat he was popular with all the kids, especially the girls. At any time of day or night, large numbers of teenagers could be found at their home, along with an empty refrigerator. Mrs. Benner was convinced there was a neon sign on their roof that read: ‘Welcome to Benner’s International House of Adolescents—Free Room and Board’.
As far as she could remember, that had all ended sometime around the first part of November, when her son stopped bringing friends to the house and withdrew. He went silent and moody, but they figured it was all part of the usual hormonal insanity that, like pimples, was known to erupt from time to time.
By Christmas, he’d dropped all extracurricular activities and refused to take phone calls. Out of desperation, they subjected him to a surprise drug screen, which came back negative. They were disappointed, Mrs. Benner said, because it ruled out any logical explanation for his behavior. Still and all, they felt their son’s suicide attempt had come out of nowhere. Confused and miserable, they wanted to know what the hell had happened.
Cat rested her hand on the boy’s bare chest and felt it rise and fall. When he awoke, she would extubate him and hope for an answer.
* * *
Inside the shell, Corky tumbled aimlessly, like a leaf in the wind. A hollow sound, like that of air rushing through a transatlantic tube, pulsated in his ears. According to the rooster-shaped clock strapped to his foot, the weekly calculus test began in four minutes, and it was Mrs. King’s rule never to admit latecomers. That meant missing the test, which meant he’d get an automatic fail, and that would blow his average and Coach Henny would have to drop him from the team, and then they’d lose the state championships, and the whole school, including Molly, would hate him, and his life would be ruined forever. No one would believe his story about the monster that had imprisoned him in a porcelain shell that smelled faintly of rubbing alcohol and Lysol.
An ominous shadow moved in behind and made a grab for him. Using all his strength, Corky hurled his body against the flesh-pink surface of the shell. As the walls crumbled, a sharp pain tore his throat and a gush of cold air filled his lungs. Whatever had been behind him was held back by the light of day.
When he opened his eyes, he was flying, his shadow sliding gracefully over the roofs of his neighborhood. Dipping and soaring, he visited backyards, flew in and out of open garages, picked a perfect persimmon from the top of Colindorf’s tree, and made the bell in St. Adolphe’s tower ring by hurling the rooster clock at it. At the bell’s clanging signal, the roofs abruptly peeled away from their rafters, leaving what looked like rows of dollhouses with their tops removed.
He sailed over Andy Leland’s house for a closer look. Inside, Mr. Leland drank shots straight from a liquor bottle while Mrs. Leland lay sweating under Mr. Colindorf across the street.
In a pink lace bedroom at the end of the block, little Annie Kochman placed a small ball of crack in the gaily-decorated pipe she’d made in her under-twelve crafts class, and lit up.
He changed direction and drifted until a strong gust lifted him over a fog bank and sent him flying for a mile. Sailing over a large Victorian, he saw a hermaphrodite standing naked before a mirror, smearing clown white over its breasts and heavily bearded face. The gynandromorph attached a bulbous red nose, and slipped under a shower nozzle dangling in mid-air. Instead of water, streams of red, white, and yellow silk flowed out, enveloping it in the uniform of a clown. The hermaphrodite stared at him, his eyes glowing red.
Corky flew toward a 1950s bungalow with pink flamingos decorating the front yard like so much gaudy lawn jewelry. Through the bungalow’s transparent walls, he watched as a 1950s June Cleaver mother cheerfully orchestrated a meal in her all-electric kitchen. In the living room, reading the daily news before a crackling storybook fire, sat a Ward Cleaver father attired in a plaid corduroy jacket with matching slippers. A well-groomed cocker spaniel slept on the hearthrug.
The tranquil scene reminded him of an old documentary he’d seen where families of test dummies were set up in normal home environments and then filmed as a nuclear bomb went off nearby.
He was maneuvering himself for a quick getaway when he caught sight of a familiar face through the upstairs bedroom window. A Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil clenched between her teeth, Molly Conover sat at her desk and stared at the wall the same way she stared at the blackboard in Mrs. Way’s fifth-period English class—as if it were a screen filled with combination Walt Disney-Mitchell Brothers daydreams. On her desk, Crime and Punishment lay open to page two.
The blonde, blue-eyed California girl leaned slightly forward to show off a portion of cleavage. His body chemistry went berserk as the cream-colored bulges of baby flesh pushed out from the lacy border of her brassiere like neatly licked scoops of vanilla ice cream nestled in waffle cones. Firm yet ravishingly tender, those B-cup mounds taunted him, pleading for one quick, accidental feel or a deliberate, slobbery kiss.
Molly caught him looking, blushed like a virgin, and gave him one of her Christ-on-the-Cross smiles before pulling her blouse closed.
He bit the back of his hand to keep himself from barking. He hovered, joyously happy just in knowing that Molly Conover and her breasts existed. That was normal, life as it should be.
A slight stir, and an increase in the pulsing sci-fi movie sound track, made him shift his gaze to the bathroom window. Someone dressed in a clown suit hid inside the shower, waiting.
He floated closer for a better look when the bathroom door swung open and a second Corky, a Corky clone, entered and walked toward the toilet, unaware of the threat at his back. Frantic, the flying Corky yelled at his pissing clone. “Look out, dude! In the shower! Get the fuck out of there, man. He’s going to—”
But the Corky clone didn’t hear. He didn’t notice the clown slip out from behind the shower curtain and fumble with the front of his balloon pants. The peeing Corky was thinking only of Molly Conover and breasts—a monster in a clown suit was the farthest thing from his mind. He shrieked against the wind, drawing the clown’s attention away from his clone.
The hideous face twisted upward, its red-rimmed eyes eagerly scanning his body. Before Corky could move, an absurdly long tentacle came from the clown’s opened fly and wound around him like a boa constrictor, squeezing until he choked.